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A civil space: James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows” insight prompted the NYPD to restore public order, ridding the streets of graffiti, open drinking and squeegee men like this one. Photo: Robert Kalfus

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice issued a lengthy report on how the nation should respond to the growing crime wave that was turning parts of American cities into war zones. What was needed, it declared, was a massive government effort to eliminate the alleged root causes of crime: poverty and racism. Policing was relegated to a mere after-the-fact response to urban lawlessness; the main crime-fighting would be done by wealth redistribution and social programs.

Root-cause theory was the dominant way of thinking about crime and policing for the next 30 years. Not surprisingly, lawlessness would continue to rise, wreaking havoc on once-vibrant cities.

It needn’t have turned out that way. Just a few months later, in 1967, James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80, published an article in The Public Interest pointing out some oddities in this blueprint for crime-fighting. Out of the commission’s 200 recommendations, only six actually addressed public safety, observed Wilson — then in his sixth year of teaching political science at Harvard.

He noted the report’s lack of empirical support: For example, the commission recommended more funding for social services as an antidote to crime, when no research showed that those programs had any effect on behavior. And it called for shorter prison sentences and for diverting criminals to probation, though nothing demonstrated that such alternatives better protected the public than incapacitating offenders in prison.

Had America acted then on Wilson’s message that crime should be fought directly through the police and other criminal-justice agencies, the nation’s subsequent urban future would have been quite different; New York wouldn’t have had to wait for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton to show the extraordinary power of policing to lower crime.

That article set the pattern for Wilson’s career. Over the next 45 years, he continued to patiently point out when the emperor had no clothes, to exercise skepticism toward conventional wisdom and to derive his ground-breaking insights from a close attention to the facts on the ground. His insights in well over a dozen books earned him a truckload of glittering prizes, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

In the 1970s, he was one of the few researchers to study actual police behavior — above all looking at the critical issue of how police do and should use their discretion. “Thinking About Crime” (rated by criminologists as one of the two most influential books to come out of their profession) argued that criminals make a rational choice to commit crime, based on an assessment of its risks and rewards. Government can lower crime by changing that calculation, above all by increasing the chance that a perpetrator will be caught and punished.

In 1982 came the article that revolutionized how we think about public order: the famous Broken Windows essay in The Atlantic, coauthored with Manhattan Institute fellow George Kelling. In the 1990s, Giuliani and Bratton made “Broken Windows” a template for the New York policing revolution. The police stopped ignoring “minor” infractions of the law, such as graffiti, public drinking and illegal vending, instead intervening to restore a sense of order in troubled neighborhoods. In so doing, the NYPD was responding to the previously unacknowledged demand in poor communities for the same sense of lawfulness enjoyed in wealthy ones.

Left-wing academics and journalists continue to dismiss that desire with their specious claim that Broken Windows policing is an unjust assault on the poor. Commissioner Ray Kelly, for one, knows better. So seriously does he take the department’s role here that he sends photographers throughout the city to take pictures of illegal street conditions; Kelly then e-mails those photos to precinct commanders to shame them into action.

Wilson and Kelling’s insights, along with the accountability system known as Compstat, have driven New York crime down nearly 80 percent since the early ’90s, transforming the city and releasing millions from the bondage of violence. Today, there isn’t a police department in the country that doesn’t apply Broken Windows theory to reduce crime and the public’s fear of crime.

Wilson’s last article for City Journal asked a question his academic colleagues would still rather overlook: Why has crime gone down in the recession? Academics’ near-universal indifference to the post-recession crime drop reflects the enduring grip of the root-causes theory of crime, which predicts that crime should shoot up during hard economic times. Fortunately, police professionals have cast their lot with Professor Wilson.

New York’s, and the nation’s, ongoing crime drop, through good times and bad, can be credited in no small part to James Q. Wilson’s empirically tested wisdom about human behavior and the rule of law.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. From City Journal online.